grief

We grieve always alone while at the same time needing community. Surely there is a role for the church in this paradox.

For career day at my daughter's school, I brought pictures of some of the things pastors do. The students were mostly interested in the funerals.

Whether we're dying or living with grief, there are faithful ways to do so. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre points us in the right direction.

Jesus went slowly, purposefully into the eye of the storm. Only through the storm would he find what he was looking for.

Richard Niebuhr uses the metaphor of a shipwreck to describe those life experiences where what we thought would hold comes apart. A marriage ends, a career collapses, an illness shatters plans, a loved one dies. Pastors and congregations can be a lifeline.

Our culture, however, is mourning avoidant—and too often, faith communities reflect the broader culture's misconceptions surrounding grief.

When we talk about grief, we often speak of it in terms of letting go, moving on, and getting over it. People want to know when they will be back to normal. But the loss of a loved one is not a bump in the road that we go over and then the pavement is smooth again. Grief fundamentally changes who we are.

When my mother died early on a spring evening in 1993, the ladies of the garden club and the bridge club gathered around my family to stand sentinel over the old-fashioned ritual of paying calls on the bereaved.

Every family has more people at the table than you can see. If we set the right number of plates, we would have to build way bigger tables.

One of the prevailing myths in North America’s mourning-avoidant culture is that within a relatively brief time after a loved one dies, we will want and receive closure. Living in liminal space and profound pain, we yearn to end such grief, to lose the sense that we’re on the bridge to nowhere. After our 25-year-old daughter Krista died while volunteering in Bolivia, as parents we heard the term often.

My daughter Krista died when she was 25. She was doing volunteer service in Bolivia, and a bus she was traveling on plunged over a cliff.

Moses Pulei, who is from Kenya, met Krista in college. He flew from southern California to Spokane, Washington, to attend her memorial service. At the reception, he approached my husband and me. “In the Masai tradition, when someone dies, our gift is to go to their home and share a story,” he said. “May I come over?”

Empathy made it big in an era some call the "me generation." By discovering my feelings inside you, even you are about me.

Without the rudder of memory, my father seemed adrift in a tiny boat on a wild, infinite sea, yet unconcerned with finding a way back to shore.

The story of John de Gruchy’s grief for his eldest son is wrenching. Yet he also wants to offer an account of Christian hope that has both biblical and scientific integrity.

After the funeral, I was ready to help the boy's family find a church home closer to where they lived. Instead, they stayed with us.

You probably won’t hear Greg Laswell's songs in church. You’re more likely to catch them on the radio or in the background of a particularly intense moment of shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, Glee, or The Carrie Diaries. Yet his songs animate the highs and lows of my spiritual journeys. I’ve also started using them in my U.S. religious history courses.

Julian Barnes’s attempt to console himself with “It’s just the universe doing its stuff” recalls C.S. Lewis’s recoil from the “goodness” of God.

It has been a season of losses. I've been reminded of the importance of knowing how to respond, and how not to.

On April 13, 2005, Richard Lischer's 33-year-old son, Adam, phoned his dad. The cancer had spread throughout Adam's body.